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"I am the world crier, & this is my dangerous career...
I am the one to call your bluff, & this is my climate."
—Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972)
—Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972)
Saturday, May 31
Should all Arctic species be red-listed?
"Just two weeks after the US decided to list the polar bear as an endangered species because of the threat of climate change, conservationists have launched a campaign to afford its diet – Arctic seals – the same protection.
The same scientists say tens of thousands more Arctic species may soon be listed as 'endangered' because of a threat several decades down the line. Some conservationists argue that all Arctic species be listed." (New Scientist)
Have we begun to crack the brain's code?
"A new computer program can accurately predict how our brains respond to any noun, whether 'celery', 'airplane', or 'kumquat'. The program guesses a word's meaning from its occurrence in a huge volume of internet text, and then builds a mental picture of the word based on the brain's reaction to other words." (New Scientist)
Over 100 countries agree to ban cluster bombs
"Major manufacturers and users of the weapons, including the US, China and Russia, did not take part, but campaigners hope the deal will put pressure on them not to use them." (New Scientist)
How to make your eye feel like it's closed, when it's actually open
"Fascinating illusion discovered by Uta Wolfe" (Cognitive Daily)
Free Idea Factory
"These are our extra ideas, for you, for free". Want to live somebody else's surplus pipe dream?
Bushnell: $1,000,000 For Bigfoot Trail Cam Photo
An essay on the contributions of trail cams at Cryptomundo ends with an announcement of the prize for a verifiable photo of a Sasquatch. [via boing boing]
Teeshirt with gun-toting robot brands you a terrorist at Heathrow
![[Image 'http://www.theedgeofmadness.com/images/fcuk_transformer.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://www.theedgeofmadness.com/images/fcuk_transformer.jpg "WTFCUK?")
Hard to be human any more?
Six 'uniquely' human traits now found in animals (New Scientist)
Friday, May 30
The Neural Buddhists
David Brooks: "The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.
Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.
Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.
Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.
This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism." (New York Times op-ed)
Cities and Ambition
"How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time." (paulgraham.com via the null device)
50 Worst Album Covers Ever?
A compilation by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Anyone prepared to claim that the album cover is a legitimate type of work of art should scan this gallery first. I went through all fifty and they include stunning examples of bad haircuts, tortured superficiality and, curiously, a disproportionate number of pairings between recording artists and dummies. Certainly, looking at most of these is a cross-cultural experience. There are a scattered few which it seems are being lampooned just for the appearance of the artist(s), rather than the cultural iconography they represent. However, there is one album among the fifty that I am proud to say I own, have valued as a profound musical experience, and am quite surprised to see lumped with the others. Can you guess which one?
Thursday, May 29
The yin and yang of cannabis and psychosis
"It is now quite widely known that cannabis use is linked to a small but significant increase in the chance of developing psychosis, but it is less widely known that one of the ingredients in cannabis actually has antipsychotic effects.
Unlike THC, it's lesser known cousin cannabidiol is not responsible for the cannabis 'high' but it is naturally present in the plant.
There is accumulating evidence that cannabidiol has an antipsychotic effect, potentially damping down the psychosis-promoting effects of THC.
The amount of this substance varies in street cannabis, with some strains having more cannabidiol than others, and 'skunk' having the least of all - it being mostly eliminated by selective breeding for high THC content.
An ingenious new study looked at levels of cannabidiol consumption in groups of cannabis smokers by testing hair samples, and found that the groups who had the lowest cannabidiol levels had the most psychosis-like experiences." (Mind Hacks)
The Miracle Fruit, a Tease for the Taste Buds
"The berry rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors for an hour or so, rendering lemons as sweet as candy." (New York TImes)
Sydney Pollack's eerie craft
Scarily relevant 33-year-old movie: "He created a highly enjoyable quasi-classic comedy with Tootsie, but director Sydney Pollack rarely dined (as Woody Allen said of humorists) at the children’s table... With the sad news of Pollack’s passing this week came an urge to revisit his underrated Three Days of the Condor. Released during the hump year (’75) of the greatest decade of cinema, Condor tapped into a Watergate/Vietnam-inspired distrust of everyone and everything. Robert Redford plays a spook whose job consists of reading books — not a bad life, until all his office mates are liquidated. A subplot involving plans to invade the Middle East (hmmm — for oil) gives this paranoid classic an eerie resonance, as does Pollack’s idea of where to house New York’s CIA station. He wanted the agency to be anonymous, to hide in plain sight. He chose the brand-new Twin Towers." (Very Short List)
Uncontacted tribe photographed near Brazil-Peru border
‘We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist,’ said uncontacted tribes expert Jos?Carlos dos Reis Meirelles Junior. Meirelles works for FUNAI, the Brazilian government’s Indian affairs department. ‘This is very important because there are some who doubt their existence.’" (Survival International)
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He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until...
"Yesterday I came across a slightly mysterious website — a collection of Polaroids, one per day, from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997. There’s no author listed, no contact info, and no other indication as to where these came from. So, naturally, I started looking through the photos. I was stunned by what I found." (Mental Floss)
Wednesday, May 28
De Partment of De Bunk
Is It True About Obama? (YouTube)
Tuesday, May 27
Evolution of flu strains points to higher risk of pandemic: study
Researchers who analysed samples of recent avian flu viruses found that a few H7 strains of the virus that have caused minor, untransmissible infections in people in North America between 2002 and 2004 have increased their affinity for the sugars found on human tracheal cells." (Yahoo! News)
![[Image 'http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/afp/20080526/capt.cps.mnt60.260508234157.photo00.photo.default-342x512.jpg?x=180&y=269&q=85&sig=iOdr3EpG2SsLuoGbwuP_wA--' cannot be displayed]](http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/afp/20080526/capt.cps.mnt60.260508234157.photo00.photo.default-342x512.jpg?x=180&y=269&q=85&sig=iOdr3EpG2SsLuoGbwuP_wA-- "No foolin'?")
McCain says he and Obama should visit Iraq together
"'He really has no experience or knowledge or judgment about the issue of Iraq and he has wanted to surrender for a long time,' the Arizona senator added. 'If there was any other issue before the American people, and you hadn't had anything to do with it in a couple of years, I think the American people would judge that very harshly.'" (Yahoo! News)
Monday, May 26
Unusual penetrating brain injuries
"A lot of people seem to share my morbid fascination with this sort of thing:... So, below are some of the more unusual penetrating brain injuries that I stumbled across..." (Neurophilosophy)
Mental illness following The Exorcist
"Horror movie The Exorcist remains one of cinema's darkest and most frightening classics. So great was its power that rumours circulated about viewers running in fear, feinting, or even going mad after seeing the film. In fact, it caused such concern that it was discussed in the medical literature for its possible role in triggering mental illness.
In 1975 psychiatrist James Bozzuto wrote an article for the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease entitled 'Cinematic Neurosis Following The Exorcist' that reported four cases of previously untroubled people who seemed to develop psychiatric difficulties after watching the film..." (Mind Hacks)
R.I.P. Utah Phillips
Family's remembrance: "Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years, died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor.
Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence or an early life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his twenties Phillips demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of working people. He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as "the Wobblies," an organizational artifact of early twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and growth in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to popularize it.
Phillips served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. Deeply affected by the devastation and human misery he had witnessed, upon his return to the United States he began drifting, riding freight trains around the country. His struggle would be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning combat veterans are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips was left to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips got off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a member of the Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.
Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as his "elders" with having provided a philosophical framework around which he later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template his audiences could employ to understand their own political and working lives. They were often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never shallow.
"He made me understand that music must be more than cotton candy for the ears," said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known folksinger and close friend.
In the creation of his performing persona and work, Phillips drew from influences as diverse as Borscht Belt comedian Myron Cohen, folksingers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and Country stars Hank Williams and T. Texas Tyler.
A stint as an archivist for the State of Utah in the 1960s taught Phillips the discipline of historical research; beneath the simplest and most folksy of his songs was a rigorous attention to detail and a strong and carefully-crafted narrative structure. He was a voracious reader in a surprising variety of fields.
Meanwhile, Phillips was working at Hennacy's Joe Hill house. In 1968 he ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. The race was won by a Republican candidate, and Phillips was seen by some Democrats as having split the vote. He subsequently lost his job with the State of Utah, a process he described as "blacklisting."
Phillips left Utah for Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was welcomed into a lively community of folk performers centered at the Caffé Lena, operated by Lena Spencer.
"It was the coffeehouse, the place to perform. Everybody went there. She fed everybody," said John "Che" Greenwood, a fellow performer and friend.
Over the span of the nearly four decades that followed, Phillips worked in what he referred to as "the Trade," developing an audience of hundreds of thousands and performing in large and small cities throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. His performing partners included Rosalie Sorrels, Kate Wolf, John McCutcheon and Ani DiFranco.
"He was like an alchemist," said Sorrels, "He took the stories of working people and railroad bums and he built them into work that was influenced by writers like Thomas Wolfe, but then he gave it back, he put it in language so the people whom the songs and stories were about still had them, still owned them. He didn't believe in stealing culture from the people it was about."
A single from Phillips's first record, "Moose Turd Pie," a rollicking story about working on a railroad track gang, saw extensive airplay in 1973. From then on, Phillips had work on the road. His extensive writing and recording career included two albums with Ani DiFranco which earned a Grammy nomination. Phillips's songs were performed and recorded by Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Tom Waits, Joe Ely and others. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance in 1997.
Phillips, something of a perfectionist, claimed that he never lost his stage fright before performances. He didn't want to lose it, he said; it kept him improving.
Phillips began suffering from the effects of chronic heart disease in 2004, and as his illness kept him off the road at times, he started a nationally syndicated folk-music radio show, "Loafer's Glory," produced at KVMR-FM and started a homeless shelter in his rural home county, where down-on-their-luck men and women were sleeping under the manzanita brush at the edge of town. Hospitality House opened in 2005 and continues to house 25 to 30 guests a night. In this way, Phillips returned to the work of his mentor Hennacy in the last four years of his life.
Phillips died at home, in bed, in his sleep, next to his wife. He is survived by his son Duncan and daughter-in-law Bobette of Salt Lake City, son Brendan of Olympia, Washington; daughter Morrigan Belle of Washington, D.C.; stepson Nicholas Tomb of Monterrey, California; stepson and daughter-in-law Ian Durfee and Mary Creasey of Davis, California; brothers David Phillips of Fairfield, California, Ed Phillips of Cleveland, Ohio and Stuart Cohen of Los Angeles; sister Deborah Cohen of Lisbon, Portugal; and a grandchild, Brendan. He was preceded in death by his father Edwin Phillips and mother Kathleen, and his stepfather, Syd Cohen.
The family requests memorial donations to Hospitality House, P.O. Box 3223, Grass Valley, California 95945 (530) 271-7144 www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org"
Gary Younge:
Clinton has run her campaign the same way Bush has run the country: "As the primary season draws to a close it has become increasingly apparent that Hillary Clinton has run her campaign with the same contempt for intelligence, decency and democracy that Bush has run the country. Like the Bush administration, her campaign has been sustained by cynicism, divisiveness and fear-mongering, leaving a toxic and rancorous rift in its wake. Like the White House, her aim has been to win at all costs. And like the White House, it has produced the same result. Failure." (The Guardian)
New Class Of Antidepressants Might Be Right Under Our Noses
Burning Incense Is Psychoactive. "Religious leaders have contended for millennia that burning incense is good for the soul. Now, biologists have learned that it is good for our brains too. An international team of scientists, including researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describe how burning frankincense (resin from the Boswellia plant) activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain to alleviate anxiety or depression." (Science Daily)
Therapists volunteer to help U.S. veterans
"Thousands of private counselors are offering free services to troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with mental health problems, jumping in to help because the military is short on therapists.Among others, an organization of mental health professionals called Give An Hour solicits therapist volunteers to commit to one weekly treatment hour for returning veterans or their families for a minimum of a year. The objective, in conjunction with the American Psychiatric Foundation, is for 40,000 mental health care providers (around 10% of the national total) to enlist in the program over the next three years.
On this Memorial Day, America's armed forces and its veterans are coping with depression, suicide and family, marital and job problems on a scale not seen since Vietnam. The government has been in beg-borrow-and-steal mode, trying to hire psychiatrists and other professionals, recruit them with incentives or borrow them from other agencies." (Delaware Online)
And Adding Insult to Injury:"This Memorial Day, as an ever-increasing number of mentally and physically wounded soldiers return from Iraq, the Department of Veterans Affairs faces a pressing crisis: women traumatized not only by combat but also by sexual assault and harassment from their fellow service members. Sadly, the department is failing to fully deal with this problem." (Wounded Times)
On this Memorial Day, my thoughts are certainly with the returning veterans and their families. A recent puff piece on the mental health impact of the war by the Dept. of Veteran Affairs did little more than mince words, concluding that"there is much that is still unknown about how soldiers adjust to the enormous demands in these new war zones. it is important to appreciate the stressors and traumas of these new wars in order to raise the awareness of civilians back home, prepare loved ones for soldiers' return, and meet the clinical needs of our newest veterans."In my opinion, however, not much is unknown about the toll this will take, except with respect to how badly the government will minimize and whitewash it (and how much of a priority the next, Democratic, administration will make of addressing this emergency).
The immorality and indefensibility of these wars from the outset, compounded by their justification by baldfaced lies and the execrable ineptitude in planning and devoting needed resources, does much to explain in the first place why such a large proportion of our enlistees are returning psychologically devastated. I will probably volunteer my time in this effort. But I have to say that it is with mixed feelings. To have to step in to compensate for the contemptible irresponsibility on the part of this malign Administration sticks in my craw to no end.
I would feel even better if there were an effort to organize mental health professionals not merely to give direct service but to educate other civilian health care providers (especially primary care MDs) to recognize and address the post-traumatic conditions of the returning veterans they will encounter. In addition to extending the reach of our expertise and facilitating the proper triage, referral and care of the victims, this would be an important societal consciousness-raising effort.
Sunday, May 25
Docs list who would be allowed to die in a catastrophe
"Doctors know some patients needing lifesaving care won't get it in a flu pandemic or other disaster. The gut-wrenching dilemma will be deciding whom to let die.In the event of a mass-casualty situation, medical resources would be have to be rationed.
Now, an influential group of physicians has drafted a grimly specific list of recommendations for which patients wouldn't be treated. They include the very elderly, seriously hurt trauma victims, severely burned patients and those with severe dementia." (CNN)
Malcolm Gladwell's Forthcoming Book
Outliers: kottke's on it (thanks, julia)
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